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I clicked on the “Super Moon” articles this morning to read about what peoples’ impressions were and found that most, if not all, were less than enthusiastic about what they saw last night. I might go look tonight for myself, as just because last night it was supposed to be its largest, tonight there can’t be that much of a change. Anyway, it got me thinking about the moon and the stars and all that we have read about the galaxy etc. And the word “lunar tic” came to mind. Sort of my rendition of a person attracted to the lunar system high above us. A person who likes to lay on their back in the dead of night and stare up at the lunar system.

At any rate the word “Lunartic” did not exist until fairly recently. Some guy invented a hub-less bicycle and called it a “lunartic hub”….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPsY2NfPJtw

When you go to this link the video is what it is and the bike looks pretty neat, but on the right side there are other videos of other inventions using this same idea to create motorbikes etc. What a crazy world we live in.

My curiosity also lead me to famous names like Aristotle and some dude I had never heard of named “Pliny the Elder”…he and Aristotle were on the same page back in the day, but Pliny didn’t get the recognition that Aristotle did, I have to surmise that is the reason I had never heard of him.

It seems that Pliny was a guy who liked to investigate natural phenomena around his local world, Italy, Germany and basically the Roman Empire at the time. He would write down his philosophical take on whatever it was that he was observing and left little to the imagination when he did so. That seemed to be the way all the philosophers of the day did their writing and it got a whole bunch of them into trouble if their writings didn’t match the thinking of the person who was ruling the country at the time.

If the king or whatever the ruler was called didn’t like what he was being told or read, off came a head…did it pay to be a philosopher at the time? Some survived so I guess it did for them. Speaking of surviving, this Pliny guy died while trying to get his boat to float when Mount Vesuvius was erupting. He wanted to get a closer look, but the winds kept his sails from unfolding and he died (probably from a heart attack) trying his best to get things moving.